OT: The History of Tiger Woods Golf Swing in a GIF

For those who enjoyed the animated GIFs of Yu Darvish, Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera you might also enjoy this animated GIF of Tiger Wood's golf swing through the years. It is interesting to watch his swing take some significant changes as he changed swing coaches. Link? LINK

He expends a lot more effort with fast twitch muscles in the first three adult swings, and a lot less in the last two. He has slowed his swing for career longevity, but without sacrificing a lot of distance.

Lately he is really trying to hold the face off and eliminate the hook from his game. When you're standing closer to the ball, it is much easier to produce the outside to inside swing needed to produce the hold off cut shot.

When you stand farther away from the ball it is easier to produce the inside to outside swing around your body, and produce more of a draw.

play a draw without hooking it. I played a draw for a long time, but now I overcook everything, short irons, driver, you name it. Now I am trying to slightly fade everything because I also can't seem to remember how to hit the damn ball straight(god forbid) and I am going mental. Bad swingthoughts! Bad!!

Where is the ball starting? If it starts straight and curves left your club face is square at impact, but your path is excessively in-to-out. If it starts left and goes left you've got the face shut and the path is in-to-out. But, if your ball starts right and then curves excessively left, your face is likely open to the target line but closed to the club path.

Irons, if struck with a properly descending blow, should produce a push draw as the path is in-to-out and the face is open to the target line. Drivers, by contrast should produce slice curve because the club path is upwards and thus out-to-in in relation to the target line.

To straighten out the irons try setting your path more to the left, i.e., open to the target line, with the faces square. Open the shoulders, hips, knees, and feet and swing on that open line with the club face square to the target line. With a 6 iron it going to be about 2 degrees "open", depending upon the degree to which you strike down, and it will increase as the irons get shorter. If you're a digger and take deep divots you might need to open more, but also work on shallowing out you angle or attack some.

On the driver, make sure you tee it higher rather than lower, and move the ball up in your stance rather than back. Work to where it starts straight with a right curve at the end. To snap hook a driver usually means the angle of attack is too steep or down, and that usually results from the ball position being too far back. When your ball starts straight and then cuts, your face is square and all you need to do is close your stance, ie, the opposite of the irons, to make your path more in-to-out.

This is know as "zeroing out" your vectors, and should produce very straight shot through the entire bag.

Tee the ball up higher on my driver. I'm lucky that I don't have a problem with distance, so I find that teeing the ball lower and almost trying to hit down on my driver makes it much easier to control.

Obviously if I was regularly playing courses that were 7000 yards I would make an effort to adjust, but I mostly try to tee it lower and look for a 270-80 yard carry.

He's always attacked the ball very well, using the maximum hip turn, but recently you can tell that his swing has gotten significatly steeper, and that has been the cause of some issues, especially in 2012 (see, British Open). But I feel like he's gotten control over his swing once again... I'm feeling a US Open victory coming up!

I'm sorry, but that's just way too fast to process. Plus it's possible he was playing a variety of shot types (cut, draw, etc.) which would account for noticable differences. The other GIFs were much more interesting in my opinion.

Tiger has reinvented his golf swing several time over the years from Harmon, Haney, and now to Foley. The changes are very subtle to even the most trained eye, and imperceptible to those with low/average knowledge of the golf swing.

As someone else mentioned, a lot of his changes have come about as a reaction to injuries, namely to his left knee. Regardless of the reasons, however, it's very impressive (at least to me) that he's had the commitment to make changes, suffer through the backslide times, and emerge as seemingly a better player.

I can tell you that his new instructor, Sean Foley, is very into using the new TrackMan Doppler radar system and I think Tiger's newest changes have really benefitted from it. Anyone serious about golf, or who wants to get better, IMO, should study the "D Plane" information coming from this awesome technology.

I was an aspiring Tour pro years back, and it's only now that I've really come to understand what actually makes a golf ball do what it does, and it's revolutionized my game.

You can see the green in the second to the right photo so that's clearly an approach shot. For us to truly compare his swings, we need to see his swings from the same type of shot. But still an enjoyable compilation though! Nice!